Today's Top Alzheimer's News

April 29, 2014

Alzheimer's potential to bankrupt nations, the global rise of Alzheimer's cases, and the impact of strategic thinking on brain health (read more).

Must reads

An April 29, 2014 Wired UK article reported on Alzheimer's potential to "bankrupt nations." According to the article, "Despite this major breakthrough, Kaplan is worried that the current trajectory of the disease will cause huge economic problems if governments don't invest more into research now. Alzheimer's is already estimated to cost $600 billion (£360 billion) a year --that's one percent of US GDP -- hence, according to Kaplan, its ability to bankrupt nations."

An April 28, 2014 Huffington Post article by Eric J. Hall, Chairman of Alzheimer’s Global Initiative, highlighted the dramatic rise in Alzheimer's cases across the nation. According to Hall, "The hard truth of the matter is that Alzheimer's disease is growing in prevalence in our world today, and the amount of funding given to this disease, in comparison to the number of lives it takes, simply does not add up. With this in mind, we all need to take a moment to truly understand what this rise in Alzheimer's cases mean. Most importantly, we need to determine what we can do as a nation to help get the funding necessary to finally find a cure and save the millions who are impacted by this disease every year."

Research and science

An April 28, 2014 Science 2.0 article reported on research that links strategic thinking to strengthened intellectual capacity. According to the article, "Strategy-based cognitive training has the potential to enhance cognitive performance and spill over to real-life benefit according to a data-driven perspective article by the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.The research-based perspective highlights cognitive, neural and real-life changes measured in randomized clinical trials that compared a gist-reasoning strategy-training program to memory training in populations ranging from teenagers to healthy older adults, individuals with brain injury to those at-risk for Alzheimer's disease."

Why 2020?

UsAgainstAlzheimer’s has retained its goal of stopping Alzheimer’s by 2020 rather than endorsing the goal of the National Plan to Address Alzheimer’s Disease that calls for preventing and effectively treating the disease by 2025. While we support the national plan and its goals, we believe, as most every family touched by Alzheimer’s disease believes, that preventing and effectively treating Alzheimer's by 2025 is simply too long a wait for concrete progress. There are promising avenues of drug discovery and development that will, if successful, deliver a means of slowing or deferring Alzheimer's symptoms by 2020. By voicing the urgency felt by so many families, we will pressure researchers and industry to do all in their power to make that happen.